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Has FeedBurner Given Up On Its Ad Network?
When CN was accepted into the FeedBurner ad network, I was very excited after all of the positive reviews I’d read. From the early days, FeedBurner was able to sell great quality ads at amazing CPMs — the typical CPM averaged at $8-10. While the fill rates were never great, the income was better than any of the other ad networks we were using. The FeedBurner ad network offers publishers a way to add advertisements into feeds hosted by FeedBurner along with ads on the site in posts supported by a feed.
Last June I wrote about my somewhat selfish-fears about Google acquiring FeedBurner and what would happen to the ad network. It looks like my fears might just be coming true.
In August FeedBurner began offering a self-service ad model which if you are reading this in a RSS reader you might see one of those ads. Most of these ads are feeds from other sites that rotate through on mine. The CPM rates are mostly $3/CPM with some $6/CPM. Fill rate overall has been ok at best but a nice additional boost in overall fill rate.
What I’ve experienced since the 3rd quarter 2007 is a slow dropoff in the number of big name advertisers using FeedBurner. This was just about the time that FB introduced the ability to run Google AdSense within the Web site ad spot. While AdSense is currently not available inside feeds, could it be far off? I’ve hoped that FB would keep their own sales staff and sell the higher quality ads that they have since the beginning but I fear that we will soon see AdSense in the feeds.
If you are using the FeedBurner ad network for your feed, what’s the fill rate and ad selection look like for you?
I’ve been seeing the same thing happening on my feed (I’m part of FeedBurner’s entrepreneur network).
Doing AdSense within feeds is not a simple issue, because RSS cannot include dynamic elements (like JavaScript). So the ads must be chosen and embedded into the RSS before it is published. This means that most of the AdSense functionality – ad rotation, budget management, bidding, etc – all goes away in an RSS environment. It’s going to be a challenge to do AdSense for RSS, and I suspect that eventually this will re-emerge as a CPM/brand advertising product. Not sure Google is the right company to be the leader on this type of advertising…
The only ad network I have ever had success with was ViralyticsMedia.com. They are more of a site repping company, but if you can get in with them they are pretty solid. Customer support sucks, but they pay well.